Technicity

by Arthur T. Bradley

Marx’s radical insight into the sheer irreducibility of technicity—its utter resistance to any attempt to boil it down to a simple object that exists for a thinking subject—is

what Derrida calls our “technological condition,”

career-long attempt on Derrida’s part to question what he calls the metaphysical “dissociation between thought and technology.”

For Derrida, technics must be already installed at the heart of whatever we understand under the concepts of “nature” (physis), “life” (both zoē and bios) and “thought” (logos, psyche, anamnēsis, et al.).

when we speak of a “technological ontology,” or technicity, we are already speaking of what Derrida terms différance;

If ontology necessarily requires an assent to the “is” of present-being, technicity discloses this being as “tele-” present, in the mode of a “prosthesis of/at the origin,” as Derrida says.

concept of an “originary technicity,”

Derrida’s

Echographies of Television,

the theory and praxis of technicity has become one of the defining—perhaps the defining—conceptual tasks of our moment.

“Technicity” remains a term whose meaning is, if anything, more contested now than ever before, some 2,500 years after Aristotle first attempted to define it: it is variously defined today as everything from a philosophical concept or idea, a historical or material process, an anthropological tool or prosthesis, an ontological condition, a mode of discourse, a way of thinking to even the basic state of life itself.

Stiegler’s concept of tertiary memory—the exteriorisation and preservation of human memory in the form of manuscripts, works of art or computer programmes—via

To what extent does technicity thereby entail a radical revision of our traditional philosophical categories (physis and technē, zoē and bios, causality, automation, instrumentality, even the very concept of “philosophy”)?

To write a manuscript is to organise one’s thought by entrusting it to the outside world in the form of traces, that is, symbols. It is only through these symbols that one’s thought is reflected, takes on real substance, making itself repeatable (iterable as Jacques Derrida would say) and transmissible: thought thus turns into knowledge.

To sculpt, paint or draw is to go out to meet the tangibility of the visible.

In this way, sculpture, painting and drawing forms the eye of its beholders and, in so doing, sculpts, paints and draws that eye—trans-forms it. This is also what Joseph...

Human memory is originally exteriorised. Straight away, this means ...

Thus, we have gone from mnemotechniques to mnemotechnologies.

everyday objects are more and more turning into supports for objective memory,

This techno-logical knowledge embodied in devices also—and especially—leads to a loss of knowledge

ask ourselves if

the industrial and large-scale development of mnemotechnologies does not constitute a structural loss of memory,

mnemotechnological base of those societies of control [sociétés de contrôle] that Gilles Deleuze started to theorise

What Socrates describes in the Phaedrus—that the exteriorisation of memory is a loss of both memory and knowledge—is what, today, we experience on a daily basis, in all aspects of our existence and more and more often in our feeling of impotence, if not disability.

All this fully sets in place the question of a biopolitics of memory.

Grammatisation is the process by which the undercurrents and the continuities that together weave existences are discretely separated: writing, as a discretisation of the flux of speech, is a stage in grammatisation.

This grammatisation of the gesture, which is the foundation of what Marx will describe as proletarianisation, that is, as loss of know-how,

electronic and numeric devices as a grammatisation of all forms of knowledge.

grammatisation of affects.

the proletariat is an economic catalyst unbeknown to itself because it is without a memory).

The memory of the proletarian has been absorbed by a machine reproducing gestures that he no longer needs to know how to make, and which he must now simply serve, because he has reverted to the status of a serf.

process of grammatisation in which it is the consumer who is henceforth deprived of his memory and his knowledge.

question of memory and its technicity,

Grammatisation

the couples constructed by Plato on the basis of the opposition between anamnēsis and hypomnēsis.

the opposition of logos and technē. The opposition of living psychic memory to dead technical memory

living memory and dead memory permanently rub shoulders with one another

To think of memory as it is today, as a new stake in the politics that make up technics, is to take the first tentative step forward.

This lost knowledge makes of knowledge an object of desire,

It is only desired inasmuch as it is lacking [qu’il fait défaut].

what makes the humanity of man, and what constitutes a break in the history of human life, is the process of the technical exteriorisation of the living.

hypomnesic technical environments which are also symbolic.

technical evolution no longer depends on biological evolution.

The process of exteriorisation is thus the process whereby a third layer of memory is constituted.

two memories: the memory common to the species, or genome, which Weismann calls germen, and the memory of the individual, termed somatic, conserved by the central nervous system in which is deposited the memory of experience.

Man gains access to a third memory supported and constituted by technics.

Husserl, perception (primary retention) and imagination (secondary retention).

Thus, before the invention of the gramophone, it was absolutely impossible to hear the same melody two times running. Since the appearance of the phonogram, which is a case of tertiary retention, and a stage of grammatisation, that is, a period of the supplement, the identical repetition of the same temporal object has become possible, and this allows us to better understand processes of retention.

This is true in general, but the tertiary retention that is the phonogram makes it obvious. Hypomnesic repetition makes a difference.

juridical is a concrete process of transindividuation—a concreteness signifying that it belongs to a period of grammatisation which overdetermines it. To promulgate a law is to transindividuate à la lettre—and the recent implementation of recordings of sounds and images in judicial instructions raises new questions of legal transindividuation.